Kansas Supreme Court: Strippers Can Collect Unemployment After They Leave The Pole

You had a job, and now you don’t. Like many people would do, a dancer at a strip club in Topeka filed an unemployment claim back in 2005 after she no longer worked there. But should the club be on the line to pay her unemployment insurance, or is she on her own as an “independent contractor” working for tips?

The Kansas Supreme Court says yup, the club’s gotta pay up when its ex-dancers leave the pole. This doesn’t mean all dancers can do so, it’s just taken a while to sort out whether or not this particular establishment has to. The pivotal point in this case lies in the fact that the workers are employees because they have to follow a bunch of state rules, reports ABC News.

Kansas Department of Labor argued that those house rules — which include things like minimum rates for dances and rules regarding interactions with customers — make the dancers employees of the club, and as such, the business has to pay into the state unemployment insurance fund.

A lawyer for the company that owns the club in question says the ruling was wrong, and those rules don’t mean the club employs those dancers. They’re just renting space to dance!

“The court relied almost entirely on the fact that we had some house rules which were requested by the dancers. They were designed to keep everything legal,” he said. “And the court relied on that fact alone to say we had control over them and that made them employees.”

In case dancers at any other establishments think this means they, too, are entitled to unemployment benefits, a spokeswoman for the states Department of Labor warned that this specific ruling only applies to the workers at this particular business.